Amazon S3 Has Outage (11:00PDT, 20 Jul)

Update 2: 8PM PDT — the service seems to be back up. Wow. What a downtime.

Update:11:23 AM PDT – still down. “Testing is still in progress. We’re working very hard to restore service to our customers.”

As of 11:05PDT, Amazon’s S3 service seems to be undergoing an outage — everything hosted on the cloud is down. This means sites like Twitter and Smugmug are affected. Amazon’s latest comment outlines that the problem “is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components.” CenterNetworks broke the outage this morning.

You can track the status here. They currently don’t seem to have an ETA, but mention that they are in the process of testing a potential solution.

This is Amazon’s second outage in the last six months or so. Given the trust that is put in by web services and content creators into S3 and the general idea of “cloud computing”, this seems to a reminder that it’s not an end-all solution and backup options might still be needed to be put in place.